Seeking a lighter touch

The TARDIS, Rose and The Doctor

In an attempt to feel less earth-bound, to rediscover - or just discover - a lighter touch in writing, to find themes more air-filled, as opposed to leaden, "imaginary maps" arrived as a topic.  Down Google's sometimes Byzantine paths I arrived here, which led me here and here to views of the sky through the ages.

But other planetary - earth-bound - curiosities lurked on this page.

Ice: A Victorian Romance

This exhibition explores the Victorian fascination with polar and glacial ice in the period from 1818 to 1860. In 1818, the British Navy began to send out expeditions in search of a Northwest Passage, broadening the search around 1840 to include Antarctica. Also around 1840, the glacial theory was proposed and debated, and the ice at the poles became the key to envisioning the ice ages of the past.

And also,

Napoleon and the Scientific Expedition to Egypt

The French expeditionary force that occupied Egypt under Napoleon's command from July 1798 until 1801 included some of France's leading scientists. Their work was published as the Description de l'Égypte, which is featured in this exhibition, along with other rare books that document the story of the French scientific expedition to Egypt.

Right now, feeling the effects of gravity seems less a failure of the poetic, the imaginative, and more a simple part of being an inhabitant of this planet.   Today I lack the wits and the energy to explore the romance of ice or Napoleon as scientist, but wanted to remind us all that voyages through space and time, as Dr. Who will attest, never quite take you where you think they will.